Edward Dowden was an Irish critic and poet. He was also the president of the Philosophical Society at Trinity College, and the first senior moderatorship in ethics and logic.
Background
Edward was born on May 3, 1843 in Mentenotte, Ireland. He was the son of John Wheeler Dowden, a merchant, and landowner, and was born at Cork. He was three years younger than his brother John, who became Bishop of Edinburgh in 1886.
He was brought up in a home rich with culture and tradition. Although his affluent middle-class family was of English and Scottish origin, they had been living in Ireland for two hundred years.
Edward's literary tastes emerged early, in a series of essays written at the age of twelve.
Education
Dowden’s education began at a young age in the public library. As he grew older, he was privately tutored before attending classes in Queen’s College in Cork. At the age of sixteen, Dowden attended Trinity College and impressed teachers and classmates with his intelligence. He received his M.A. in 1867 and then attended divinity school.
Career
In 1867 Edward Dowden was elected professor of oratory and English literature in Dublin University.
His first book, Shakespeare, his Mind and Art (1875), was a revision of a course of lectures, and made him widely known as a critic, being translated into German and Russian; and his Poems (1876) went into a second edition. His Shakespeare Primer (1877) was also translated into Italian and German.
In 1877, Dowden went on to publish his primer called Shakespeare, a basic book aimed at nonacademic readers. Although the book came under criticism from some for being too simplistic, it enhanced Dowden’s popularity among readers. In addition to writing, Dowden also traveled extensively, including two trips to America. He also lectured outside Dublin frequently. He lectured at Oxford in 1889, at Cambridge between 1892 and 1896, and at Princeton in 1896. But no matter how often or how far he traveled, Dublin was always Dowden’s home and his source of inspiration. He also remained true to Trinity College and stayed there all his life, despite offers from other universities.
Dowden’s next project, a two-volume biography on the poet Percy Bysshe Shelly, was an ambitious undertaking. Published in 1886, Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley confirmed Dowden’s reputation as a pioneer scholar of his time. For Dowden, writing the biography proved very difficult. Dowden had the delicate task of dealing with a scandal from Shelley’s past.
Dowden went on to write several more biographies, including Southey, published in 1879. Dowden published Michel de Montaigne in 1905. Using a combination of research of the letters left by Montaigne, his writings, and other facts Dowden was able to capture the essence of Montaigne as a writer and a person. A Dial reviewer wrote, “It is no cut-and-dried biography, but an illuminated record of the mind and soul of the man whom Sainte-Beuve called ’the wisest Frenchman that ever lived.’ ”
Dowden’s interest in English literature led him to issue Essays Modern and Elizabethan. Published in 1910, this book included sixteen essays reprinted from reviews on such various topics as Shakespeare and Elizabethan romance. According to a review in the Saturday Review, “Professor Dowden wears his erudition as lightly as a Frenchman, and he spices his chapters with the stories that are always new.”
Toward the end of Dowden’s life, his health was faltering as the bronchial problems that he had had for years began to worsen. He died in 1913.
Edward Dowden thought, that literature should not be divorced from practical life.
Membership
Edward Dowden was a member of English Goethe Society, Irish National Library (trustee).
Personality
Quotes from others about the person
As Richard Eaton notes, “Dowden brought stature to his discipline by applying to it the spirit and some of the tools of more traditional studies (careful editing, scrupulous handling of materials), as well as by his graceful writing style and immense industry.”
Interests
French literature
Writers
Robert Southey
Connections
Edward Dowden married twice, first (1866) Mary Clerke. Dowden suffered a great loss when his first wife died in 1892; he was soon able to find inspiration in another woman. In 1895 he married Elizabeth Dickinson West, who had been a friend for many years.
His daughter by his first wife, Hester Dowden, was a well-known spiritualist medium.
In 1878 Dowden was awarded the Cunningham gold medal of the Royal Irish Academy “for his literary writings, especially in the field of Shakespearian criticism.”
In 1878 Dowden was awarded the Cunningham gold medal of the Royal Irish Academy “for his literary writings, especially in the field of Shakespearian criticism.”